Having been living his life a quarter mile at a time for the last 20 years, Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto is planning to go out in a blaze of glory with the concluding tenth and eleventh installments in the Fast & Furious franchise. Knowing that the ninth entry sends some of the gang into outer space, though, it’s impossible to imagine what he’s cooking up behind the scenes with director Justin Lin.
You’d have thought the action star would be content to keep throwing on Dom’s white vest for as long as possible, given that he pockets a paycheck in the $20 million range every time he reports for duty, not to mention his status as a producer giving him a cut of the profits and his long-held desire to turn almost everything he touches into a multi-film series, but in a new interview, the actor revealed why he believes now is the right time to start building towards the grand finale.
“Every story deserves its own ending. I know people are going to feel like it doesn’t have to end, but I think all good things should. There are reasons for a finale. I think this franchise has deserved it. This franchise was born from the pavement, from the concrete. The world just championed this underdog to a place where it has already surpassed all of these other franchises. But the franchise has a soul, and that soul has to rest.”
Obviously, it’s not as if Universal are letting the highest-grossing property in the studio’s history fade away once the mainline Fast & Furious story screeches to a halt. A sequel to Hobbs & Shaw remains on the cards, and a buddy blockbuster starring Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham is virtually guaranteed to do big business as the first film’s box office haul north of $750 million will attest, while the long-gestating female-led spinoff is somewhere out there in the developmental ether.
It’s not like Fast & Furious could go on forever, and when the opener arrived in 2001, nobody could have predicted where things would ultimately end up, but you can guarantee the crew will be going out in the most insanely spectacular fashion possible.